Aesthetics are at least as old as Plato, but ‘Aestheticism’ originates from the early nineteenth century. This is because Aestheticism is neither a theory, nor a philosophy, nor even a field of enquiry, but a set of priorities, born of historical circumstance: the demise of religious certainty and the growth of scientific method. Later in the century it was joined to a lifestyle—‘The Aesthetic Movement’—which involved a taste for Liberty furnishings, Whistlerian painting, japonaiserie, and a certain flexibility in sexual conduct. It was entirely possible to pursue the intellectual interests of Aestheticism along with the transient tastes of the ‘Movement’ (both Oscar Wilde and William Morris did so, in their different ways), but Aestheticism proper is a critical attitude that has survived, with modifications, from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.

That, in many ways, is a surprising fact. When we now read nineteenth-century criticism, of whatever period or school though particularly when it is aesthetic, we are likely to find ourselves alienated by the assumption that achievement of an ideal ‘Beauty’ is the aim of all art, especially when this is accompanied by agonizing over the relation of ‘Beauty’ to ‘Nature’. The difference between Aestheticism and the other nineteenth-century approaches is not that it concentrated upon beauty to the exclusion of everything else, but that it made feelings, admittedly the feelings engendered by art in particular, the means by which mankind could discover and explore its true identity. It is often forgotten that, as Raymond Williams pointed out in Keywords, the precise opposite of aesthetic is not ‘unaesthetic’ but ‘anaesthetic’ (Williams, 1976, pp. 27-8).

Aestheticism even went so far as to suggest that through the contemplation of art man might find greater satisfactions than were offered by either conventional religion or mechanistic science. And it made that subversive claim in spite of, or rather because of, the failure of Romanticism to provide a lasting replacement for the first or a serious rival to the second.

Print this page

While we understand printed pages are helpful to our users, this limitation is necessary
to help protect our publishers' copyrighted material and prevent its unlawful distribution.
We are sorry for any inconvenience.